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Talk:Marijuana
Boy, sounds like a great book, sure am sorry to be missing it.Turtle Fan 19:43, December 29, 2011 (UTC) American Drug Problem The 2000s and 2010s so far have been the worst decades for America's drug problem in American history. I know the US has always had drug problems in major cities like New York and LA, but these two decades have had a major illegal drug usage rise in the population. It's not just marijuana though, Cocaine, Heroin, and other illegal drugs are ruining society. :I don't have any stats handy, but I do have the very strong impression that drug abuse was quite common in both the suburbs and the sticks long before the new millennium. Turtle Fan (talk) 15:02, June 20, 2016 (UTC) ::The War on Drugs was declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. ML4E (talk) 23:55, June 21, 2016 (UTC) :::I know that. Nixon may have done so in response to a purely urban problem; if so, it stopped being so much earlier than Jacob's suggesting. I remember when I was a kid being warned over and over that drugs were starting to break into the suburbs in a big way. :::To the best of my knowledge, no one was using drugs in my grammar school class, and that class was small enough and gossipy enough that I'm reasonably sure I would have heard something. I can think of a fair number of classmates in high school who were using to some extent or other. No one I was really close to, though that qualifier set a pretty low bar in those days. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:08, June 22, 2016 (UTC) I'm perfectly fine if marijuana is used for medical purposes such as slowing down the pain for cancer. I'm also fine if the hemp plant is used to make fabric, paper, rope, and other things. :I was always highly skeptical of claims of its medical use, and moving from the northeast to the southwest, where it's far more common, has done much to reinforce that impression. Turtle Fan (talk) 15:02, June 20, 2016 (UTC) ::I have never been particularly strong on criminalizing marijuana use for recreational purposes and over the years have come to the conclusion that it is no more harmful than alcohol use and perhaps less so. So banning it makes no more sense than Prohibition. From what I see, more harm comes from it being illegal than from substance abuse. Not to say that I ever used it because I haven't. My thoughts were that smoking tobacco was unhealthy so inhaling smoke from other types of vegetation probably was no better. ML4E (talk) 23:55, June 21, 2016 (UTC) :::Much worse, actually, at least in this case; I've heard estimates of its toxicity ranging as high as fifteen times that of tobacco. It also poses a threat of brain damage in adolescents which can be irreversible even after quitting. As bad as tobacco is, it doesn't do that; its far more modest effects on brain chemistry repair themselves after several months' abstinence. :::The point that people miss about alcohol is, human evolution has provided a mechanism for resisting its toxicity. The why and how is a bit of a long story, but apparently it was the very last physical trait we needed before we could abandon our nomadic lifestyle, build permanent settlements, and begin altering our environment to suit the needs of our physiology rather than the other way around. So while it's still a harmful substance, it's not foreign to our biochemistry the way the active ingredients in other drugs are. (It's also far simpler chemically, so the various enzymes produced by our livers are easily a match for any reasonable quantity we might ingest.) :::Decriminalizing recreational use does lessen some social problems, but it exacerbates others (it's worsened the drought in the western US appreciably) and creates still more ex nihilo (it's had a chilling effect on interstate commerce). Even if none of that were so, I'm yet to hear anyone suggest any social benefits it offers, with the exception of hypothetical tax revenues. But the higher the tax you impose on it, the more people will continue to use the already-existing black market, so the most convincing argument I've come across--that it will break the backs of the drug cartels--is compromised. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:08, June 22, 2016 (UTC) What do any of you guys thing of the problem that is plaguing modern society? -- 13:30, June 20, 2016 (UTC)Jacob Chesley the Alternate Historian :A plague is right. There are so many social plagues these days, and we seem so helpless to combat them. But this idea that life more or less requires that we fuck about with our neurochemistry is especially saddening. Turtle Fan (talk) 15:02, June 20, 2016 (UTC)